Trump(ism) Threatens Liberal World Order, and Us Constitutional-Democratic Norms

Inderjeet Parmar

A Professor of international politics and Associate Dean of Research in the School of Policy and Global Affairs at City, University of London, a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and a columnist at The Wire. He is an International Fellow at the ROADS Initiative think tank, Islamabad, and author of several books including Foundations of the American Century. He is currently writing a book on the history, politics, and powers of the US Foreign Policy Establishment.

Atul Bhardwaj

Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library working on “Eurasian Connectivity and its Impact on Maritime and World Order”. He is the author of India-America Relations 1942-62- Rooted in the Liberal International Order (Routledge, London 2019). He has been writing a Strategic Affairs Column in the Economic and Political Weekly since 2013. He has several publications in national and international journals. He has been a Research Fellow at the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, Delhi and also Senior Fellow, Indian Council of Social Science Research. He is currently an Adjunct Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi. He has a doctorate in History from Ambedkar University, Delhi and a masters in War Studies from King’s College London. He holds a BSc degree from National Defence Academy, Pune. He served in the Indian Navy in the aviation branch for two decades.

A second Trump presidency would throw some traditional foreign policies into disarray, and beckons a dictatorship at home

A growing divide in US foreign policy circles signals a significant shift in America’s global role and challenges the liberal world order long championed by the US foreign policy establishment. This rift pits proponents of the traditional post-1945 US-led imperial-internationalist system of multilateral institutions and globalization against those favouring a rival imperial strategy based on “vital” interests. The latter represents a more transactional, weaponized bilateral approach, especially in international economic and trade relations, but also in regard to military interventionism for “humanitarian” or other purportedly “idealist” purposes. But make no mistake, US globalism is merely recalibrating, not fundamentally transforming, remaining a coercive superstate bent on primacy.

This global coercive strategy has its domestic counterpart: dictatorship. At home, Trump has declared he would be a dictator on the first day – abolish all regulation of fossil fuel corporations and deport millions of illegal immigrants. More recently, Trump promised Christian evangelicals that if they vote for him in November, they need never vote again. Trump’s fingerprints are all over the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 which promises to invoke laws to bring troops onto US streets to repress democratic rights to protest, to give the president complete control over executive agencies by dismissing thousands of career civil servants in favour of his political appointees, curtail the rights of workers and trade unions, and diminish checks and balances that have been the mainstay of the US constitution since 1787. That is, an even more coercive state wedded to naked corporate interests. On top of that, the US Supreme Court recently ruled that a former president is presumed to be exempt from legal actions taken in their official capacity.

Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies